


forests / fields / seas

by VioletSargent



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: (at least... it's as soft as adam and gansey can be to each other), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, First Kiss, M/M, Panic Attacks, Pining, it's soft!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-08-19 22:24:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20217268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VioletSargent/pseuds/VioletSargent
Summary: Adam was okay, but Gansey couldn’t stop feeling the phantom grief of what he had almost lost.Set during The Dream Thieves, post-Adam's disappearance from the Gansey home. In this timeline, they spend another night in D.C.





	forests / fields / seas

What mattered was this: Adam was okay. 

Gansey lay with his limbs all neatly positioned beneath impossibly smooth bedsheets; cool and white and noisy in their high thread count, ferociously tucked under the sides of the mattress. He was hemmed in, thrumming, like a wildness was seconds away from overcoming him, that ever-present buzzing in his ears droning louder like biplanes in hot summer stillness. He’d scared all his anger away hours ago, and all that was left was a hollow and reverberating fear. 

Adam was okay. He was sound asleep in the guest room across the hall, having insisted he wouldn’t take Gansey’s room. He was okay, but Gansey couldn’t stop feeling the phantom grief of what he had almost lost. 

Here was the thing: Gansey could create scrapbooks, journals, anthologies of Adam Parrish. His hands twitched with the urge to keep a tally of each time Adam yawned in practised silence. He could fill chapters with swatches of forests and fields and seas just in search of the precise colour of his eyes. What he wanted, more than most things, was to know Adam down to the atom, to map him, unlock his secrets, learn his language and write him endless odes. To teach him the gentle, difficult safety that comes with being loved. To hear him gasp just -- _so_ \-- and study the topography of his gooseflesh with lips and teeth and tongue.

And yet - _people are not your projects, Gansey._ Especially not Adam. That much was violently clear. 

Still, he lay flat on his back under Egyptian cotton and tried to imagine himself on a single mattress with creaky springs; the heat radiating off the hot tin walls of a trailer long after the sun had set, listening to a father yelling abuse at the TV and to a mother who never says anything at all. He imagined fear, hatred, pride. For all his imagining, Gansey couldn’t quite conjure up a stink of alcohol that wasn't champaign or fine whiskey. 

And with that, suddenly, after hours of paralysed thought, he had to escape, and swiftly. He hadn’t quite realised how close he was to hyperventilating until he gave himself a moment to feel his heaving chest. 

He swallowed back on the coarseness of his dry tongue. A glass of water was an achievable goal. He scrambled to extract himself from the prison of his bed and shove his wireframes onto his face. With silent muscle memory from years of childhood insomnia, he was propelled across the carpeted hall and down the staircase. 

Somehow he found himself in the larder, beyond the sink. He’d overshot a bit, perhaps, but now that he was amongst the busy shelves all he could think to do was to crouch in the corner. A sliver of moonlight cut a gash across the cold marble tiles. Maraschino cherries and saffron threads and limoncello and dried figs dotted the rows above him. No one in his family even much liked citrus liqueurs. 

His own toes looked foreign to him, bare and chilled on the hard floor. He was so good at pulling it all back, laughing politely over cucumber sandwiches, _ginger ale that looked like Moet_, smoothing those crazed and hungry parts of himself down and into clean shapes. But then there were moments like this when, like a quick-growing vine, his heartache seemed to smother everything in sight. Adam was okay. Gansey couldn’t seem to remember how to right himself. 

He’d just disappeared, was the thing. Everything was slipping through his grasp, gossamer-thin and painfully far away. Ronan and Blue and Glendower. And losing Adam… 

_Ah_. There were the tears. One fell to create a tiny puddle on his knee. The wasps behind his ears swarmed and reared. 

He didn’t hear the open and shut of cupboards or the whoosh of the tap running. He didn’t hear footsteps until they were right in front of him. For a single bizarre second, Gansey could have believed he conjured Adam out of thin air. In the greyscale of the night, he looked impossible.

“Gansey, what in the hell-” Adam stopped himself as soon as his eyes adjusted to the larder’s dimness enough to see Gansey’s heaving chest. The taut agitation in Adam’s face eased into a softer sadness. With a grunt, he lowered himself to the ground, leaning back against the organic quinoa and pressing their shoulders together in silent solidarity. They’d both seen plenty of these nights. 

A few inches of their skin touched between where their tee shirt sleeves ended and their elbows began. Gansey could feel the fine hair on Adam’s arm brush against his own. “C’mon now, Gansey. You’ve gotta breathe steady,” he muttered into the blackness. A tiny part of Gansey wanted to haughtily inform Adam that he was already trying his darnedest to do just that, but the humming kaleidoscope of panic impeded him. It was probably for the best. 

“I’m sorry,” he said instead, forced out in stutters. A fresh tangle of knotted nausea rolled its way through his middle. 

Adam’s hand found its way to Gansey’s knee; warm and firm. It startled Gansey enough to pull his sticky gaze away from the tiles and to Adam’s sharp features. He was resolutely forward-facing, though, even as he pressed a finger into Gansey’s kneecap, and then another, silently counting Gansey’s inhales. 

Gansey did his best to think about three and four and the next. He forced the numbers into every corner of his mind until he couldn’t think about the fear, or the guilt, or the way there was something soft fluttering at the base of his throat in reaction to Adam touching him like this. Gansey thought hard about sixteen and seventeen and, eventually, a glass of water was pressed into his hands. He found himself able to take a grateful sip, his chest blessedly stilled. This was what Adam was best at; remembering the goal and achieving it while Gansey surveyed the scenery. 

“Let’s go back upstairs.” Adam pushed himself to his feet and held out his hand. Gansey swiped the back of his wrist across his cheeks to dry the dampness there and let himself to be hauled to his feet before following Adam back across the kitchen.

From behind, Gansey allowed himself a moment of observation. Adam’s worn tee shirt hung gauze-thin from his shoulder blades, its stretched-out neckline revealing the dip at the top of his spine and the sunburnt stretch of skin that disappeared into his hairline. As they reached the hallway he turned for the guest room. Panic threatened at Gansey’s throat once more.

“Adam?” Gansey whispered. “Stay with me tonight.”

Adam stilled, staring at the floor. 

“Please?” 

Gansey watched him swallow, then turn towards him. This was a terrifying lunge towards an unspoken truth, and they both knew it. Gansey held his gaze and tried not to start shaking again. There was a long pause before Adam finally gave a twitch of his head in agreement.

Gansey shut his bedroom door quietly behind them. The far-off moon projected a grid of rectangles across the bed, catching on Adam’s angles and throwing them into sharp contrast. It was only once Gansey had hauled the sheets down and burrowed himself beneath them that Adam relented and lay down too, putting an arms-length between them. He looked breathtaking in black and white. Gansey didn’t realise he was staring until Adam reached over to slide the wireframes off his nose and deposit them on the bedside table, a wry little smile pulling at the edge of his lips.

“That seems unfair,” Gansey muttered, suddenly surrounded by a soft blur and smiling now too.

“Yeah… well,” Adam replied in teasing sort of way that meant - _life isn’t fair, pal_. 

Gansey sobered. “I know you hate it here. I really am sorry for making you come.”

“You didn’t make me.” 

“No, I suppose I didn’t. But I’m still sorry.”

Adam sighed half a lungful of warm air onto Gansey’s pillow. “You can stop apologising. It isn’t your fault.”

It was, though. It was always Gansey’s fault, whether by choice or by coincidence. _The lady on the phone had said he looked like a body by the side of the road._

Blindly, he reached for Adam’s wrist beneath the covers, pressing his fingerprints into the pulse point. “I thought you were dead, Adam,” he said, so soft he could hardly hear it himself. “I thought you died and the last thing we ever said to each other was-”

And then suddenly Adam was propped on one elbow, leaning over him and pressing their lips together like he meant it; chaste and forceful, then softening when Gansey tilted his chin and leant into him. It was an apology, a revelation. Something warm and sunshine yellow bloomed in the centre of his chest, surely too large to be contained. It was sweet, slow. One of Adam’s hands cupped his cheekbone, gentle and desperately soothing, and Gansey moved his grasp to intertwine his fingers with Adam’s other hand. 

Eventually, Adam pulled away, breathing heavy, only to press their foreheads together. He peered down through whisp-like eyelashes. “I’m alive. We’re both still alive, Gansey,” he murmured. 

Gansey’s breath hitched, inches away from the heat of Adam’s mouth. The fluttering in his throat was now full-blown turbulence. “You’re miraculous, Adam Parrish,” he whispered; like a prayer, like a spell to be cast.

Adam eased himself back to the pillow, much closer this time so that all Gansey had to do was roll onto his side and press his nose to his clavicle. Adam slid and arm around his waist. “This would never last, Gansey.” 

That was the painful crux of it. They were doomed in too many ways, from too many angles. Two cabins divided by forest fire.

“No, I know,” he replied. “It doesn’t make it any less true right now, though.”

Adam was silent, his fingertips tracing the ridges of Gansey’s ribs, the heat of his sunburnt cheeks warming the overpriced linens. For now, they knew each other, just enough for it to ache.

**Author's Note:**

> If you read this, you're a champ. This was mostly an exercise in forcing myself to let go and publish work that is lowkey a mess. Thank you so much for sticking through to the end! I hope you enjoyed it in all its mixed-metaphor glory. 
> 
> (also, oh my god, i've just realised that there is a line in the book that describes the sleeping arrangements as completely different from what i've written. apologies! just pretend it was part of my plan lmao)
> 
> I'm on tumblr [@ashwinder](https://ashwinder.tumblr.com/).


End file.
